Related papers: Co-optimizing Physical Reconfiguration Parameters …
Humanoid robots, as general-purpose physical agents, must integrate both intelligent control and adaptive morphology to operate effectively in diverse real-world environments. While recent research has focused primarily on optimizing…
The advantage of modular self-reconfigurable robot systems is their flexibility, but this advantage can only be realized if appropriate configurations (shapes) and behaviors (controlling programs) can be selected for a given task. In this…
We introduce and analyze a model for self-reconfigurable robots made up of unit-cube modules. Compared to past models, our model aims to newly capture two important practical aspects of real-world robots. First, modules often do not occupy…
A hierarchical control architecture is presented for energy-efficient control of legged robots subject to variety of linear/nonlinear inequality constraints such as Coulomb friction cones, switching unilateral contacts, actuator saturation…
Soft robots have gained significant attention due to their flexibility and safety, particularly in human-centric applications. The co-design of structure and controller in soft robotics has presented a longstanding challenge owing to the…
In evolutionary robotics, jointly optimising the design and the controller of robots is a challenging task due to the huge complexity of the solution space formed by the possible combinations of body and controller. We focus on the…
This paper identifies and addresses the problems with naively combining (reinforcement) learning-based controllers and state estimators for robotic in-hand manipulation. Specifically, we tackle the challenging task of purely tactile,…
Tendon-driven robots, a type of continuum robot, have the potential to reduce the invasiveness of surgery by enabling access to difficult-to-reach anatomical targets. In the future, the automation of surgical tasks for these robots may help…
We develop an optimization framework centered around a core idea: once a (parametric) policy is specified, control authority is transferred to the policy, resulting in an autonomous dynamical system. Thus we should be able to optimize…
End-to-end robot manipulation policies offer significant potential for enabling embodied agents to understand and interact with the world. Unlike traditional modular pipelines, end-to-end learning mitigates key limitations such as…
This paper presents a real-time programming and parameter reconfiguration method for autonomous underwater robots in human-robot collaborative tasks. Using a set of intuitive and meaningful hand gestures, we develop a syntactically simple…
Origami inspired architectures offer a powerful route toward lightweight, reconfigurable, and programmable robotic systems. Yet, a unified mechanics framework capable of seamlessly bridging rigid folding, elastic deformation, and stability…
Ergonomics is a key factor to consider when designing control architectures for effective physical collaborations between humans and humanoid robots. In contrast, ergonomic indexes are often overlooked in the robot design phase, which leads…
This work investigates an application-driven co-design problem where the motion and motors of a six degrees of freedom robotic manipulator are optimized simultaneously, and the application is characterized by a set of tasks. Unlike the…
Magnetic soft robots embedded with hard magnetic particles enable untethered actuation via external magnetic fields, offering remote, rapid, and precise control, which is highly promising for biomedical applications. However, designing such…
A number of image-processing problems can be formulated as optimization problems. The objective function typically contains several terms specifically designed for different purposes. Parameters in front of these terms are used to control…
We implement and evaluate different methods for the reconfiguration of a connected arrangement of tiles into a desired target shape, using a single active robot that can move along the tile structure. This robot can pick up, carry, or drop…
Worm-inspired robots provide an effective locomotion strategy for constrained environments by combining cyclic body deformation with alternating anchoring. For compliant robots, however, the interaction between deformable anchoring…
Despite the growing interest in robot control utilizing the computation of biological neurons, context-dependent behavior by neuron-connected robots remains a challenge. Context-dependent behavior here is defined as behavior that is not the…
Shape-morphing finds widespread utility, from the deployment of small stents and large solar sails to actuation and propulsion in soft robotics. Origami structures provide a template for shape-morphing, but rules for designing and folding…